NetApp Provides Disaster Recovery for Hillsborough County Library

May 27, 2008 - The Hillsborough County Library Services (HCLS), located in Tampa, Florida, solidified its disaster recovery capabilities and streamlined its overall storage environment with NetApp S500 storage solution.

HCLS, with over 350 employees, is the central facility for the library system that serves Hillsborough County. The library contains over 2.1 million volumes and circulates 8.2 million items a year. While data growth was never an issue for HCLS, its previous IT infrastructure was unable to handle backups at the same time as file storage.

Disaster recovery is a crucial component for HCLS because of its location in Florida. While the library survived more than 10 years without a fully featured backup scheme, changes were made to upgrade its rudimentary backup processes.

Disaster recovery is something that we placed a very high premium on given the key role that HCLS plays in the success of the Hillsborough County library system, said Jason Biggers, general manager of HCLS. Unfortunately, our previous backup and recovery method wasnt the long-term solution we needed. After looking around, we decided that the network storage capabilities of NetApp combined with the virtualization capabilities of VMware gave HCLS the best possible solution to meet our business needs.

HCLS deployed two S500 units, each configured with 12 500GB drives and RAID-DP. On one of the S500s, HCLS is able to run four physical servers and 27 virtual servers, essentially placing all server data in one location. Combined with VMware, which is hosted on the S500, HCLS can conduct hardware upgrades and more efficient storage management.

The second S500 unit is deployed at a remote, higher altitude location, for disaster recovery. Backups are now performed nightly and replicated to the remote S500 during the day. This replication enables the safety and integrity of HCLSs data.